The canal was built for him by his agent John Gilbert with advice from James Brindley to service his coal mines at Worsley, in Lancashire.

[3] As a child Francis was sickly and of such unpromising intellectual capacity that at one time the idea of cutting the entail was seriously entertained by his mother.

[3] Shortly after attaining his majority he became engaged to the society beauty the Dowager Duchess of Hamilton, but her refusal to give up the acquaintance of her sister, Lady Coventry, led to the breaking off of the match.

[citation needed] Thereupon the Duke broke up his London establishment, and retired to his estate at Worsley where he devoted himself to the making of canals.

But the genius of John Gilbert, his agent and Brindley, his engineer, proved superior to all obstacles although at one period the duke's financial resources were almost exhausted, the work was carried to a triumphant conclusion.

[4] Both canals were completed by the time Bridgewater was thirty-six years of age, and the remainder of his life was spent in extending them and in improving his estates.

He was the leading member of the syndicate which purchased and partly resold the famous Orleans Collection, from the banker Jeremiah Harman in 1789.

In 1798 he purchased en bloc sixty-four Italian and French paintings including Raphael, Titian, Annibale Carracci and Nicolas Poussin.

The duke died unmarried on 8 March 1803, and the ducal title became extinct although the Earldom of Bridgewater passed to a cousin, Lieutenant-General John Egerton, who became 7th Earl).

In order that the trust should last as long as possible, an extraordinary use was made of the legal rule that property may be settled for the duration of lives in being and twenty-one years after.

In the 1830s, the possibility was discussed of raising a memorial to the Canal Duke in Manchester, but at the time public statuary was relatively unknown outside London.